Windows Weekly 236: The PC Plus Era

In the latest episode of the Windows Weekly, Iyaz Akhtar, Mary Jo and I discuss a slew of Microsoft rumors, the potential folly of Microsoft's Windows-centric strategy, a new beta version of Microsoft Security Essentials, a new milestone for the Windows Phone Marketplace, Dryad and Hadoop, and the future of Silverlight.

Microsoft is late to the game, but you can and should backup your entire music collection to the cloud now. And you can do it for free. Google Music provides free cloud-based storage of up to 20,000 songs. Amazon Cloud Player (part of Amazon Cloud Drive) provides 5 GB of storage for free and has different tiers of storage you can pay for (20 GB is $20 per year, for example.) Anything you buy from Amazon isn't counted towards your storage total. And both services backup not just your collection but also your playlists.

Software pick of the week: iTunes Match, part of Apple iCloud

Apple takes the cloud music game a step further and will actually replace your music collection in the cloud with pristine, 256 Kbps AAC versions which you can then download and keep. The feature, called iTunes Match, is not free--the service costs $25 per year--but you only have to pay once to do this and, regardless, it's well worth it.